Tool demo presentation by Maelick Claes of UMONS (directed by T. Mens and Ph. Grosjean) during ICSME 2014 conference in Victoria, Canada (October 2014). Abstract: The R development community maintains thousands of packages through its Comprehensive R Archive Network CRAN. The growth and evolution of this archive makes it more and more difficult to maintain packages and their interdependencies, and the existing tools that aim to help developers in this process no longer suffice. We propose maintaineR, a web-based dashboard that allows CRAN package developers to understand and deal with the implications and problems raised by package updates. The dashboard complements existing analysis tools by providing additional support such as the visualisation of package dependencies and reverse dependencies, package conflicts, cross-package function clones, and so on.

1. maintaineR
A web-based dashboard for main-tainers
of CRAN packages
Maëlick(Claes
Tom$Mens$&$Philippe$Grosjean
&$
Software$Engineering$Lab$ Numerical$Ecology$of
Aquatic$Systems$Lab
2nd$October$2014,$ICSME$2014
2

2. Introduction

3. hUp://www.rXproject.org
Statistical$environment$based$on$the$S$language
Packages$with
Code$(R,$C,$Fortran,...)
Documentation
Examples
Tests
Datasets
...
CRAN$(Comprehensive$R$Archive$Network)
Official$R$package$repository
Strict$policy$for$package$acceptance
Package$quality$regularly$checked$&$archive$process
Complaints$in$the$community$Hornik$2012,$Are$there$too$many$R
packages?

4. Previous work
Preliminary$empirical$study$using$CRAN$metaXdata
On$the$maintainability$of$CRAN$packages$(CSMRXWCRE$2014)
R$CMD$check$results$from$CRAN:
hUp://cran.rXproject.org/web/checks/
Most$errors$resolved$quickly$without$developer$intervention
Maintenance$effort$needs$to$focus$on$fixing$errors$caused$by$others
Need$for$a$more$specific$tool$to$detect$problems$related$to
dependency$changes

5. maintaineR

6. Architecture
VirtualBox
+
Vagrant
extractoR maintaineR
cloneR
igraph
RCurl + XML
hash
Shiny
DB WebApp
timeline rCharts

7. Running maintaineR
hUps://github.com/ecosXumons/maintaineR
hUps://github.com/ecosXumons/CRANData
Required:$igraph,$rCharts,$d3Network,$shiny,$timeline,$RCurl,
shinyIncubator,$extractoR.utils
install.packages(c("igraph", "d3Network", "shiny", "RCurl", "devtools"))
devtools::install_github("rstudio/shiny-incubator")
devtools::install_github("ramnathv/rCharts")
devtools::install_github("ecos-umons/extractoR/extractoR.utils")
devtools::install_github("ecos-umons/maintaineR")
shiny::runApp(system.file("webapp", package="maintaineR"), port=3000)

8. Demo
hUps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3RWTsVnPqg

9. Future work
CLI$check$tool$on$a$new$package$version
General$UI$improvement
Performance$optimization
Global$CRAN$view
View$all$packages$of$a$maintainer
Present$information$about$package$tests
Function$call$graph

10. Thanks ffoorr yyoouurr aatttteennttiioonn
Questions?
SSlliiddeess:: hhttttpp::////mmaaeelliicckk..nneett//pprreesseennttaattiioonnss//iiccssmmee22001144//